Who is Nuwa? Guide to the Chinese Goddess Who Made Humans
Nuwa is one of the oldest creator figures in Chinese mythology, and one of the most consequential. She shaped the first humans out of yellow clay. She mended the sky when it cracked and threatened to collapse. In some traditions she is also the sister-wife of Fuxi, the culture-hero who taught humans hunting, fishing, and writing. Depicted in ancient Chinese art with the body of a serpent and the head of a woman, she is a figure from a much older layer of Chinese mythology than the celestial bureaucracy of the Jade Emperor, and her story preserves the Chinese tradition’s oldest answers to the question of where humans came from and how the world was kept from breaking.
Key Takeaways
- Nuwa (also written Nüwa, and sometimes Nu Wa) is one of the oldest creator deities in Chinese mythology, credited with creating humanity from yellow clay.
- She is the sister-wife of Fuxi, the culture-hero credited with teaching humans hunting, fishing, cooking, and the use of writing.
- She is famously the mender of the sky, who used molten stones of five colours to repair a crack in the sky after the water god Gong Gong butted his head against Mount Buzhou and broke the pillar holding the sky up.
- In ancient Chinese art she is depicted with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a serpent, often intertwined with the similarly-formed Fuxi.
- She belongs to the tradition of the Three Sovereigns (San Huang), the earliest legendary rulers of Chinese civilisation, along with Fuxi and Shennong.
- Her stories predate the systematised Taoist celestial court and represent an older, more animistic layer of Chinese religious tradition.
- Her worship as a living tradition is more limited than that of the Jade Emperor or Guanyin, but she remains a culturally recognised figure across the Chinese-speaking world.
Who is Nuwa?
Nuwa is a primordial goddess of Chinese mythology, associated with the creation of humanity and the mending of the sky. She belongs to the oldest layer of Chinese religious tradition, predating both the systematised Taoist pantheon and the arrival of Buddhism, and she is one of the few Chinese deities whose stories are attested in some form as far back as the Warring States period (roughly the fifth to third centuries BCE).
Definition - Nuwa
A primordial Chinese goddess credited with creating humanity from clay and mending the sky after it cracked. Her name is written in Chinese as 女媧 (Nüwa). She is often depicted with a woman’s head and torso and a serpent’s tail. She is sister-wife to Fuxi and one of the Three Sovereigns of Chinese legendary prehistory.
Her depiction in ancient Chinese art is striking. On tomb bricks from the Han dynasty and earlier, she appears with the upper body of a woman - long-sleeved robes, elegant hair - and the lower body of a serpent or dragon. She is often shown intertwined with Fuxi, whose lower body is similarly serpentine, their tails entangled together. The imagery is one of the oldest religious symbols in Chinese art.
Nuwa creates humans
The most widely known story about Nuwa is her creation of humanity.
In one common version, the world had been formed but was empty. Nuwa walked the earth and found herself lonely. She knelt beside a pond of yellow water and began to shape figures from the yellow clay of the riverbank. Each figure she made came to life as she set it down. She worked for a long time, and the first humans were created this way, one by one, by her own hands.
Eventually she grew tired. She had made hundreds, thousands of humans by hand, and the earth was still mostly empty. So she took a vine, dipped it in the clay, and flicked droplets across the ground. Where each droplet landed, a human appeared. She populated the earth much faster this way.
The tradition preserves this as a class distinction. The humans she made carefully with her own hands - the ones from the first, careful phase - were the noble and aristocratic ones. The humans she made by flicking droplets from a vine - the mass-produced ones - were the common people. This is one of the Chinese tradition’s origin stories for social hierarchy. Read Nuwa creates humans.
The story preserves a very old Chinese religious idea: that humans are literally made of the earth’s clay. The connection between human bodies and the yellow soil of the Chinese heartland is theological, not just poetic.
Nuwa mends the sky
The second great Nuwa story is the mending of the sky, and it may be even older than the creation story.
The world was supported by four pillars at its corners. The sky was above; the earth was below. The water god Gong Gong, in a rage after losing a battle, butted his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the pillars supporting the sky. The pillar broke. The sky cracked. Water poured through the crack in torrents that flooded the world. Fire fell from the broken sky. The earth tilted. Everything the humans Nuwa had made stood to lose.
Nuwa acted. She gathered stones of five colours - blue, yellow, red, white, and black - and melted them together. With the molten stone she patched the crack in the sky. Then she cut the legs off a giant tortoise and used them as new pillars to replace the broken one, stabilising the sky again. She calmed the flood by killing a great black dragon whose thrashing had been part of the disaster.
The world was saved. But the fix was not perfect. The Chinese tradition explains certain features of the world through the imperfection of Nuwa’s repairs. The sky tilts slightly toward the northwest (which is why celestial objects appear to move that way at night). The earth tilts slightly toward the southeast (which is why Chinese rivers flow east to the sea). Nuwa’s repairs preserved the world but left visible marks. Read the legend of the goddess Nuwa mending the sky and the story of Gong Gong the water god.
Nuwa and Fuxi
Nuwa’s relationship with Fuxi is one of the oldest religious pairings in Chinese tradition. Fuxi is credited with teaching humans the arts of civilisation: hunting, fishing, cooking with fire, the writing of the trigrams that became the basis of the I Ching, and the arrangement of marriage.
In many tellings, Fuxi and Nuwa are brother and sister who survive a great flood and become the ancestors of a new humanity. In some tellings they are also husband and wife, and their intertwined serpent-tailed depictions in Han-era art may represent their marriage or their joint role as ancestors. Their pairing is preserved in some early sources without full explanation. Read the story of Fuxi and Nuwa.
Together, Fuxi and Nuwa represent the two sides of the Chinese origin story: the creation of humanity (Nuwa) and the teaching of civilisation (Fuxi). Nuwa made the raw material; Fuxi taught it what to do.
Nuwa and the Three Sovereigns
Nuwa is often counted as one of the Three Sovereigns (San Huang), the earliest legendary rulers of Chinese civilisation. The composition of the Three Sovereigns varies by tradition, but the most common grouping includes Fuxi, Nuwa, and Shennong (the god of agriculture and medicine).
The Three Sovereigns predate the Five Emperors (Wu Di), the semi-legendary rulers of the Yellow River valley from whom the Chinese tradition traced the origin of imperial rule. Together the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors constitute the mythic prehistory of the Chinese state. Read the legend of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
Nuwa’s inclusion among the Three Sovereigns preserves her as not just a mythological creator but a cultural founder. She belongs to the layer of tradition that gave the Chinese people their origin story.
Nuwa compared to other creator goddesses
Creator goddesses appear in many world traditions. Nuwa’s combination of creating humans and saving the world from cosmic collapse is unusual.
| Tradition | Creator goddess | Creation | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese | Nuwa | Made humans from yellow clay | Also mended the broken sky |
| Sumerian | Ninhursag | Shaped humans from clay with Enki | Mother goddess of the earth |
| Egyptian | Neith | Wove the world into existence | Also weaver and war goddess |
| Yoruba | Obatala | Shaped humans from clay | Sky-father figure |
| Hopi | Spider Woman | Created humans from four coloured earths | Diné (Navajo) tradition has similar figure |
| Haudenosaunee | Sky Woman | Fell from sky, earth built on Turtle’s back | Foundational creation figure |
The parallel with Obatala is close: both are creator gods who make humans from clay, and both traditions distinguish between well-made and poorly-made humans (though Obatala’s variations are attributed to drunkenness rather than to a two-stage production process). The recurrence of the “humans made from clay” motif across many traditions suggests a very old idea about human origins.
Read the stories
Nuwa appears in some of the oldest Chinese origin stories. Some entry points:
- Nuwa Creates Humans
- The Legend of the Goddess Nuwa Mending the Sky
- The Story of Fuxi and Nuwa
- The Story of Gong Gong the Water God
- Pangu Creates the World (the older creation figure who precedes Nuwa)
- The Legend of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors
- The Story of Zhurong the Fire God
Nuwa is the goddess Chinese tradition trusted with what mattered most: the making of humans and the keeping of the sky. Her stories are older than the celestial bureaucracy that later organised Chinese heaven, and they preserve a Chinese religious layer in which the world was still being shaped by hands and mended when it broke. The tradition preserves her, still serpent-tailed in ancient art, still credited with the clay that every human being was said to have been made from.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Nuwa create humans?
The tradition preserves that Nuwa knelt beside a pond of yellow water and began shaping figures from the yellow clay of the riverbank. Each figure came to life as she set it down. She made the first humans one by one, by hand. When she grew tired, she dipped a vine in the clay and flicked droplets across the ground; where each droplet landed, a human appeared. The Chinese tradition sometimes reads the hand-made humans as the ancestors of the noble classes and the droplet-humans as the ancestors of common people.
Why did Nuwa have to mend the sky?
The sky broke when the water god Gong Gong, in a rage after losing a battle, butted his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the four pillars holding up the sky. The pillar broke. The sky cracked. Water poured through the crack, fire fell from the sky, and the earth tilted. Nuwa used molten stones of five colours to patch the crack in the sky and cut the legs off a giant tortoise to serve as new pillars. Her repairs saved the world but left the sky tilted slightly toward the northwest, which is why celestial bodies appear to move that way.
What does Nuwa look like?
In ancient Chinese art, particularly on Han dynasty tomb bricks, Nuwa is depicted with the upper body of a woman - long-sleeved robes, elegant hair, sometimes carrying a compass - and the lower body of a serpent or dragon. She is often shown intertwined with Fuxi, whose lower body is similarly serpentine, their tails wound together. The imagery preserves an older layer of Chinese religious thought when the primordial deities were envisioned as partly reptilian.
Who is Fuxi?
Fuxi is a culture-hero of Chinese mythology, credited with teaching humans hunting, fishing, cooking with fire, and the use of the trigrams that became the basis of the I Ching. He is often paired with Nuwa as brother-sister and sometimes as husband-wife. Together they are considered ancestors of humanity and cultural founders of Chinese civilisation. He is depicted in ancient art with a serpent-tailed body similar to Nuwa’s.
Is Nuwa still worshipped today?
Nuwa’s active worship as a living tradition is more limited than that of the Jade Emperor, Guanyin, or the various city and household gods of contemporary Chinese folk religion. But she remains a culturally recognised figure across the Chinese-speaking world, and shrines to her exist in various parts of China. Her stories are taught to children as part of Chinese cultural heritage, and her image continues to appear in modern Chinese art and popular media.
Is Nuwa related to the concept of yin and yang?
The pairing of Nuwa (female) and Fuxi (male) in ancient art, with their serpent tails intertwined, is sometimes read as an early expression of the yin-yang balance that became central to later Chinese thought. Whether the ancient artists intended this connection or whether later interpreters read it in, the imagery has been treated as prefiguring the yin-yang relationship. The two figures are also often shown holding a compass (Nuwa, associated with the circular sky) and a square (Fuxi, associated with the square earth), symbols of the ordered cosmos.